Apple's new music service: Will it help curb piracy?

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Durandal
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Apple's new music service: Will it help curb piracy?

Post by Durandal »

Well Apple has just launched the iTunes Music Store, with the support of the Big 5 record labels. It works as follows:

The user can download songs for $0.99 a pop. There is no subscription.
Album downloads are $10.00 a piece (mostly).
All songs are 128 kbps AAC audio files in MP4 containers.
30-second previews are available for the user.
The user can stream the audio to a limit of three other Macs, using iTunes' ZeroConf/Rendezvous support.
The user can burn the same playlist up to 10 times, to prevent mass-distribution of a burned CD.
The user can copy the songs to an unlimited number of iPods (currently the only portable player I can think of that supports MP4).

The drawbacks:

Currently, the service only supports Macs ... and only those running OS X ... version 10.2. This makes for only a few million people who will be downloading at most, which is probably why the record labels cut the deal in the first place. It's a small testbed. I think Jobs said that they were working on Windows support, and that it would be available by the end of the year.

So, assuming this service makes it to Windows in a timely fashion, do you think it would help curb music piracy and make everyone happy due to the rather reasonable DRM in place? Do you think that, as the service becomes more popular, the record labels will demand stricter and more intrusive DRM measures?

Discuss.
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Post by Joe »

No. You can't compete with free music.
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Post by Hamel »

Mac fans are dedicated

I wouldn't be surprised if this takes off~ Apple also claims that AAC at 128 is better than vbr at 128

Who knows
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Post by Queeb Salaron »

No way will it work. Poor college kids can't afford a dollar a song, especially not when I have 1400 music files on my computer. That's $1400 bucks I wouldn't have otherwise. Fuck that, I like my Kazaa and Direct Connect. What would those Apple users get that I won't get, besides protection from lawsuits?
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Post by Durandal »

Queeb Salaron wrote:What would those Apple users get that I won't get, besides protection from lawsuits?
Guaranteed quality, download bandwidth and absense of spyware.
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Post by Queeb Salaron »

Durandal wrote:Guaranteed quality,
::shrugs:: I get good quality stuff. And if it happens to be bad, I can always download another version in about 10 seconds.
download bandwidth
I use Direct Connect on a local hub that links every computer in the school to everyone else's computer. Bandwidth ain't no thing. I dl between 800 and 1000 kB/s.
and absense of spyware.
Quick fix: AdAware. Download it off Kazaa.
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Post by Joe »

I dl between 800 and 1000 kB/s.
Fuck you. :evil:
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Post by Queeb Salaron »

Durran Korr wrote:
I dl between 800 and 1000 kB/s.
Fuck you. :evil:
Fuck yourself. You'll get more pussy.

;)
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Post by Wicked Pilot »

I think the bigger and more important question here is if anybody gives a shit about Mac any more.
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Post by Queeb Salaron »

Wicked Pilot wrote:I think the bigger and more important question here is if anybody gives a shit about Mac any more.
[Generagion Y] What's a Mac? [/Generation Y]
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Post by Joe »

Wicked Pilot wrote:I think the bigger and more important question here is if anybody gives a shit about Mac any more.
RDF, man. RDF.
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Post by Wicked Pilot »

Durran Korr wrote:RDF, man. RDF.
I too like Rarely Dressed Females, but what does this have to do about that other what's it called computer plarform?
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Post by Joe »

Wicked Pilot wrote:
Durran Korr wrote:RDF, man. RDF.
I too like Rarely Dressed Females, but what does this have to do about that other what's it called computer plarform?
No, Reality Distortion Field. It's what Steve Jobs puts out in order to convince Mac users that their computers are faster than a P233.
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Post by Wicked Pilot »

Durran Korr wrote:No, Reality Distortion Field. It's what Steve Jobs puts out in order to convince Mac users that their computers are faster than a P233.
Ah, and for a second I thought it was Rabid Donkey Fuckers. I guess the WCOTC uses Winblows.
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Post by phongn »

Durran Korr wrote:
Wicked Pilot wrote:
Durran Korr wrote:RDF, man. RDF.
I too like Rarely Dressed Females, but what does this have to do about that other what's it called computer plarform?
No, Reality Distortion Field. It's what Steve Jobs puts out in order to convince Mac users that their computers are faster than a P233.
I sense another Mac vs. PC flamewar occuring with that last silly quote (at least the part regarding the P233) :P
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Re: Apple's new music service: Will it help curb piracy?

Post by phongn »

Durandal wrote:The user can stream the audio to a limit of three other Macs, using iTunes' ZeroConf/Rendezvous support.
Nonono, you can run the file on up to three Macs (via DRM key) but you can stream to quite a few more (I think it was ten/machine).
So, assuming this service makes it to Windows in a timely fashion, do you think it would help curb music piracy and make everyone happy due to the rather reasonable DRM in place? Do you think that, as the service becomes more popular, the record labels will demand stricter and more intrusive DRM measures?
It won't make a dent, IMHO. People are cheap.
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Post by phongn »

Durandal wrote:
Queeb Salaron wrote:What would those Apple users get that I won't get, besides protection from lawsuits?
Guaranteed quality, download bandwidth and absense of spyware.
128kBit AAC == the super lame. 160-192 kBit AAC would be much better.
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Post by phongn »

Queeb Salaron wrote:
Durandal wrote:Guaranteed quality,
::shrugs:: I get good quality stuff. And if it happens to be bad, I can always download another version in about 10 seconds.
It is kinda of a crapshot, however, especially with all of those Xing-encoded MP3s on the 'net. People don't take the time to use LAME to make good MP3s usually.
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Post by phongn »

Hamel wrote:Mac fans are dedicated

I wouldn't be surprised if this takes off~ Apple also claims that AAC at 128 is better than vbr at 128
128kBit AAC is arguably near parity with a LAME-encoded 128kBit ABR MP3. Apple is making this claim based on the Fraunhofer MP3 codec, which isn't that good. AAC really shines at low bitrates, IMHO.
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Post by Darth Wong »

Nobody in his right mind is going to want to pay for fucking DRM files which you can't transfer freely and can't burn to make conventional CD's.

I might be able to see a dollar per song for regular MP3 files and all of the flexibility that they entail, although I suppose one could argue that it's still too much money for a college student (what a load of bullshit; they must have gotten a lot poorer since I went to school and bought hundreds of CD's with my own money).

In any case, the music industry deserves to die and be replaced by an improved offspring. In a conventional business, you must produce and keep producing all of the time. Very few businesses are based on decades of residuals for a one-off product, and most workers in conventional industries generally cannot do ONE good thing and then live the rest of their lives on that, the way musical one-hit wonders can. The exception would be patents, but they are time-limited, and anyone who seriously thinks that a song benefits humanity as much as a genuine advance in technology is deluding himself.

In any case, if free music can't be killed, then the end result is to force artists and music studios to provide more bang for the buck when they sell something (eg- replacing CD audio with DVD videos and sell them for the same price; they already make videos of all their songs anyway, for fuck's sake). But if even that is only a temporary fallback position which will be overtaken by technology eventually, then the long-term solution is to simply base their economic model on things which cannot be copied on a computer, such as the live performance experience and related merchandising.

Would this kill most of the music industry's revenue? Yes. Is this a bad thing? No. The music industry stands alone in its expectation that a healthy business should be able to:

A) Live indefinitely off of residuals for product which is made for comparatively miniscule material costs.

B) Charge such enormous profit margins that the product is sold for an order of magnitude greater than its cost.

C) Tell the customer what they can and can't do with the product once they've purchased it.

And artists seem to be living under the ridiculous expectation that once they write a song, they deserve to be able to live off it forever. If some genius invented a device which cured fucking cancer, he would only be able to live off the patent royalties for 17 years, but some idiot writes a song and he can live off it forever :roll:

In short, fuck the music companies. This is not just about being cheap; it is about seeing a business model which is based on cartel practices and having no sympathy for the fat cats who profit from it, not even the artists. Normal people have to work for 40 years to retire; an artist needs only make one good song. Boo fucking hooo for those sad artists who see people trading their music.
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Post by Sea Skimmer »

C holds true for the computer industry as well.
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Post by Einhander Sn0m4n »

Well that pretty much capped this thread.

Thanks Darth Wong. You just enumerated my exact word-for-word feelings on DRM and the RIAA.

FUQ, anyone? :D
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Post by Howedar »

So, let me think here.

Option A is free and lets me do whatever I want.
Option B costs money and restricts my abilities to do what I want.

Duuuuh...
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Post by RedImperator »

I was going to leap to the defense of the artists as copyright holders, seeing as my dream is to be a professional writer, but if the publishing industry tried to pull the same shit the music industry has, they'd deserve to go bankrupt, and at any rate, the solution for publishers if they want to prevent losing sales to file transfers is to keep publishing in a format that's difficult and time-consuming to convert into an easily copied and transfered file--i.e., books. Or, conversely, they could sell e-books, realize they're going to lose money to file-sharing, and then smile and realize how much money they've saved not having to print, bind, and distribute physical books.
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Post by Darth Wong »

RedImperator wrote:I was going to leap to the defense of the artists as copyright holders, seeing as my dream is to be a professional writer, but if the publishing industry tried to pull the same shit the music industry has, they'd deserve to go bankrupt, and at any rate, the solution for publishers if they want to prevent losing sales to file transfers is to keep publishing in a format that's difficult and time-consuming to convert into an easily copied and transfered file--i.e., books. Or, conversely, they could sell e-books, realize they're going to lose money to file-sharing, and then smile and realize how much money they've saved not having to print, bind, and distribute physical books.
The music industry could simply revert to selling DVD-9's packed with videos and special additions and viewable lyrics and lots of other goodies. You can't burn a DVD-9 (DVD-R only goes to 4.7GB) and most people don't have a DVD-R anyway, so there would be very little piracy. Even those people who have the resources and know-how to down-compress a DVD-9 to fit on a DVD-4.7 are settling for an inferior, kludgy version which is not as good as the real thing, and the vast majority would prefer to just buy the real thing.

A radical idea, eh? Actually give an unhappy customer more bang for the buck instead of trying to shaft him. Too bad the music industry would never go for it.
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